I read the trilogy. It doesn't suck, which puts it in the top 2% of fantasy books you're likely to find at a non-used bookstore these days.

The most charitable reading I can give to the end of the trilogy is that it owes a debt to a certain conservative reading of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War.

I liked the second book best, but I'm a sucker for military fantasy. I did feel that it was very crisp though.

I don't think the magic in there is very Sorcerer-ish at all. The problems wizards have are external and magic is understood as a kind of complex mental discipline/technology.

However, the trilogy is good for Sorcerer-think in the sense that the characters who matter (Cnaiur and Achamian definitely, Kellhus and Esmenet maybe) have humanity struggles at the center of their ongoing stories. Paka, let me know if you finish or quit the trilogy and I'll discuss this further if you're interested...I hate spoilers.

The stuff I wanted to discuss really requires reading the trilogy as a whole to not spoil, since it's about which of those four end up at Humanity 0 and which end up at Humanity 1, and all of that doesn't get resolved until the end.

I do think that Bakker's story runs on the engine of something like Humanity = Personal Integrity (including loyalty to others such as you've committed it, 'duty' in the personal commitment sense I guess) and that the big 'Demon' isn't Mog-Pharau or any of that bullshit but Kellhus' monastic discipline. That is, the book posits that (a) most people are completely unaware of their motives for acting, and are thus easily manipulable and (b) Kellhus' monks know how to manipulate it and therefore have a power far, far greater than sorcery. I think Kellhus starts the story at Humanity 0, Cnaiur and Achamian inadvertently bring him to Humanity 1, and then...well, that's what I don't want to talk about. But anyway the thing that chews up all the Humanity in the trilogy is Kellhus' monastic training and the way he uses it to manipulate other people.

And so the trilogy's kind of interesting philosophically in that it poses this question, what the hell is 'personal integrity' when the real springs of our actions are essentially veiled from us? And why does it matter? And why shouldn't we put ourselves in the hands of a superman like Kellhus who understands it? (This last question it poses most severely, I think, because of the Consult, though there's a kind of twist even in that if you read the third book carefully.)